


solitude for the stoic, mirth for the merry

by sleepdeprivedsurgeon



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Agoraphobia, Angst, Canon Asexual Character, Chronic Pain, Disordered Eating, Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Flashbacks, Gender Dysphoria, He/Him and They/Them Pronouns for Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Multi, Nonbinary Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, Teacher Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, They/Them Pronouns for Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Trans Georgie Barker, Trans Martin Blackwood, eventually, like there is a Gender Chapter but u gotta wait a little while, oops! all trauma!, there's no top surgery tag??????? fucking fix it, top surgery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-25 21:00:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30095049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepdeprivedsurgeon/pseuds/sleepdeprivedsurgeon
Summary: And this is how his life starts. Or, starts again.He thought he’d feel relieved. He does, but he thought it would be overwhelming. What he mostly feels is nothing; all the images of the world put back together, all the details, it’s all been passing through him. He hasn’t been living it. He wonders if he’ll ever be living it. He doesn’t deserve to be living it. Damn it.[writing some postshow domesticity to cope except i am incapable of writing happy fic. there will he happy moments though. i promise][title comes from A Big Day for Grimley by AJJ]
Relationships: Basira Hussain & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Georgie Barker & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood & Melanie King, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 7
Kudos: 29





	solitude for the stoic, mirth for the merry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey fellas calling this one "i'm mentally ill"  
> chapter title comes from Woke Up New by the Mountain Goats  
> content warnings include:  
> \- medical references/hospitals  
> \- dissociation  
> \- reference to past self-harm of the eye-gouging variety  
> \- dissociation/flashbacks

The world, and all the people within it, picks up where it left off.  
Across the street from the charred frame of the former Magnus Institute, a woman leans against the doorframe of a charity shop, yelling into her phone. A few kids walk by, studying the fire for a few moments before categorically ignoring it. A man is walking his dog in the opposite direction of them. It looks like it’s going to rain. It looks like late afternoon. It looks like London without the eyes and cameras.  
They sit on the front steps until the fire department arrives, Jon’s head in Martin’s lap, Martin’s hand in Jon’s hair. Taking it in. Hoping it’s real. They’re both badly hurt— burns from the fire starting to blister, bruises so deep they haven’t shown up on their skin yet— but they’ve both had worse. Much worse. And the relief easily overpowers the pain.  
Martin’s hand finds Jon’s, and he takes it, running his fingers along the threshold between skin and scar tissue. It’s unusually quiet; almost silent except for the creaking of burnt wood and the occasional car passing by. And he’s given up on the idea of any benevolent powers, but he counts it as a blessing. Counts all of it as a blessing, and one they’ve earned. Because, fuck, they did it. He wants to stand up and scream: ‘look! All the buildings have got the right amount of doors, and nothing is watching us, and nobody’s dying who shouldn’t be! You’ve all got work in the morning, and dinner tonight!’ He wants to, but he’d sound like a madman, and it would disturb the man lying on top of him.  
“Jon?”  
“Mm.” He shifts so that he’s looking up at Martin.  
“It worked.”  
“Mm-hm.” He’s staring blankly up at him, and the sky around him, eyes barely open.  
“Alright. The ambulance’ll be here soon. Go to sleep.”  
Jon shakes his head, and lifts his free hand up to cup Martin’s face. Both of them ignore how much effort it takes. “...I see you.”  
Martin feels pressure building behind his eyes. Sirens sound a few blocks away. “I see you, too.” 

Jon sleeps for a week straight, his heart rate speeding up, his brain activity slowing down. Once, one of the nurses tells Martin that he’s not healing as fast as he should be, and it takes everything in Martin not to tell her that it’s a good thing. Every day for a week, he stays as long as the hospital lets him, sat in the uncomfortable chair by Jon’s bed with a book or a job listings site, and every night for a week he goes back to Georgie and Melanie’s apartment, makes them dinner and sleeps in their guest room. He changes the bandages on the burns that cover most of his side and he reminds himself, constantly, that nothing is lurking in the corners, or looming on the horizon. He rewrites his resume to include a little more of the truth and he calls Georgie’s landlord about a newly-vacant apartment three floors down from her.  
A lot of his time in the hospital, he spends looking at Jon. At the way he sleeps with his eyes closed, at the way his hands twitch at his sides, closing into fists for half a second before relaxing again. He’s beautiful. He’s always beautiful, but now there’s a warmth under his skin that hasn’t been there in years, and his chest rises and falls in a steady rhythm. Martin revels in it. Safety is a good look on Jonathan Sims.  
Sometimes he sits in the hospital cafeteria and watches the people come and go. It’s been so long since he’s seen people living anywhere close to normalcy. Now, though, people eat their lunch while they catch up with their coworkers or listen to music. Over the course of the week, he watches two women flirt across the same table every day until one asks the other out for drinks. It’s almost unbelievable. He reminds himself that nothing is sitting above them pulling the strings; that this is the world, back the way it’s supposed to be, not some false hope constructed to make the next inevitable tragedy that much more painful. It’s just a cafeteria, and Jon, sleeping upstairs, is going to be okay. Both of them are.  
When Georgie has a free hour or two, she joins him in Jon’s room. They speak quietly, or not at all, glancing between each other, and the busy street outside the window, and the sleeping figure in front of them. Usually, they try and avoid anything beyond small talk here; they save the bigger questions on the mechanics of the new world— and how any of them plan on making it through the rest of their lives without having some kind of breakdown— for late at night, when they’ve drunk enough to really think about it. Saturday afternoon, though, after nearly an hour of silence, Georgie speaks up in a tentative voice: “Do you know if he’s still… I don’t know, I know the entities are gone, but he said they were the only thing keeping him alive. And he’s, well, alive.”  
Martin sighs. “I don’t know. Annabelle said he might survive. But I honestly don’t care. I think any residual Archivist bullshit is a pretty small price to pay for the entire world. He’s always been human to me. Or human enough, anyway.”  
“I guess I’m just worried. For him more than anything.”  
“Me, too. I guess we’ll find out when he wakes up.”  
They lapse back into silence for another few minutes, but all of a sudden Martin can’t sit still. He reminds himself that nothing’s coming for Jon this time; that nothing’s coming for any of them. “I’m going to run down and get some tea. Do you want anything?”  
“Thanks, I’m alright.”  
Martin nods and gets up, wandering through the hallways for a while. He gets his tea and spends a few extra minutes watching the people in the cafe. Offhandedly, he wonders if he’s going to get a reputation for staring in his new, post-apocalypse life. If that’s what’s going to happen, he doesn’t think he cares. He takes the long route back to Jon’s room.  
The first thing he notices, approaching the open door, is that Georgie’s not in her chair. The second thing he notices is that there’s a few nurses inside. The third thing is that— looking a little disoriented, letting Georgie help him sit up— Jon is awake.  
The tea in Martin’s hand drops to the clean tile floor as he runs the rest of the distance to the bed. Thankfully, everyone in the hallway and room makes way for him. He barely registers the baffled smile lighting up Jon’s face before he’s pulled him into his arms, burying his face in Jon’s hair, swinging a leg over both of his. Jon returns the gesture without a second of hesitation, pressing himself closer and fisting his hands in fabric of his jacket. They both refuse to move, except for breathing, the feeling of their chests against each other. Eventually, dimly, they hear footsteps walking away. They’re alone. They’re safe and they’re alone. Jon’s grip on his jacket tightens, trying to get even closer. Then he moves upward, suddenly, catching Martin in a long, soft kiss. The lights and heart monitor hum. Jon comes up for air.  
“Hello,” he says, voice weak from disuse.  
“Hi.” Martin lets his forehead fall against Jon’s, smiling.  
“I, um,” his voice drops even lower “this is… real, isn’t it? The hospital, and everything.”  
“It’s real. I’ve been walking around London all week. It’s all normal. Picked up right where it left off.”  
“Good. That’s… good.”  
“Are you- how are you feeling?”  
“Everything hurts, kind of. I guess that’s a good thing. It’s been a while since I could really say that. And- oh.”  
“What?”  
Jon lets out a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob, face breaking into a grin on the edge of tears. “No Eye.”

They discharge him two days later, and Georgie drives everyone back to her place. Jon sits in the backseat, his head leaning against Martin’s shoulder, staring out the window. At the open signs in the windows. At the traffic lights. At the buildings. At the clouds. At the people. And he tells himself it’s real. He’s not quite sure how much he believes himself; he’s still not convinced that the nurses in the hospital weren’t just things with masks on. But if all of it is here to lure him into a false sense of security, it’s working. His hand finds Martin’s and he holds on.  
It’s starting to rain. It had been raining on the last real day he remembers, sitting by the window in the safehouse. God, he doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve it, and he doesn’t even know if he’ll survive it. The whole two days he’s been awake, he keeps losing his place in his own thoughts, forgetting where he is, spacing out in the middle of conversations. It feels like his vision’s gone black around the edges. It feels like the floor’s dropped out from under him. He has a headache that won’t go away. Those are all small prices to pay for a life, and for the rest of the world. But it’s hard. He’s never been good at adjusting to new things. Or, in this case, readjusting to old ones. Especially when he knows he doesn’t deserve it. By the time he’d gotten the hang of being an archivist, he’d been, well, the Archivist. And on that word, he’s lost again, struggling to remember how much people are supposed to know, supposed to see, and everything’s so hazy, he doesn’t know where he is, where anyone is, he’s on the kitchen floor somewhere in Scotland, he’s in front of his bathroom mirror holding a pair of scissors in front of his eyes, he’s in a coffee shop staring down a stranger, he’s in a hospital where all the doctors are just things with masks on, and he’s somewhere else, too, but he can’t remember, and he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to—  
“You alright, love?”  
Martin. The car. A London traffic jam. He blinks a few times and realizes he’s shaking. “Sorry, I’m just…”  
“I know.”  
He does know.  
“Do you have anything left in your apartment?” Georgie asks. “It’s on our way if you want to stop by.”  
Jon blinks again. He had an apartment, in the beginning. There’s probably still clothes in the closet, and sheets on the bed that haven’t been washed or slept on in months. The coffee table is probably still covered in research, books open, half-finished pages of notes scattered between them. The kitchen’s probably full of long-rotted food; he’d lost interest in cooking long before he’d stopped living there. He can’t imagine going back now. Not with everything that could be waiting for him. “Not tonight,” he says hoarsely. His voice still isn’t back yet. Maybe it never will be. Maybe they took it with them when they left. Maybe, eventually, they’ll take everything with them. Jon doesn’t know how much of him is actually left, which parts of him have been him and which parts have been something else. He knows that at the end, it didn’t matter; they’d been indistinguishable. It feels like something’s missing, in the back of his mind, just beneath his ribs, under the skin in his hands. It’s a good thing. He tells himself it’s a good thing.  
The car slows to a stop outside Georgie’s building. The motion sends pain radiating from his shoulder down his arm and across his chest. He grits his teeth; this part of his humanity, he hasn’t missed. Eventually, he’ll have to go back to his place and dig his cane out from wherever he abandoned it, the same time he’d stopped wearing his glasses. Martin pries his hand out of his grip and climbs out the door. The sudden cold and silence makes it a little hard to breathe.  
They’d let Martin stay through the times visitors aren’t allowed; the first night he’d left like normal and Jon hadn’t been able to breathe, he couldn’t think straight. Separation anxiety is a trauma response, is what they’d said. The two of them had made the hospital bed work for both of them. Now, he manages to keep it together until Martin opens his door, helps him out onto the sidewalk.  
The rain hits his face. He doesn’t know how long it’s been since that happened. He closes his eyes and breathes in, smells the car exhaust and the rain and whatever detergent Martin uses on the t-shirt he’d given him. He doesn’t know how long it’s been. It’s been a while, though; he knows that. If his knees weren’t about to buckle under him he could stand there forever.  
“Let’s go inside,” Martin says, taking his hand again.  
“Right.” He can’t manage more than the bare minimum of anything, but talking is the worst. It takes too long for him to sort out the right words to say, and then they sit in the back of his throat and refuse to leave. On the rare occasion he can actually get them out, they hurt.  
Georgie fumbles with her keys for a few moments before she manages to unlock the apartment door. It’s smaller than Jon remembers it; that’s a good thing. His room at the hospital had been too big. If there’d been something waiting in the corners he wouldn’t’ve known. She’s turned on the colored lights that run along the crown molding of the whole place. If he weren’t so tired, if it didn’t hurt so much, he’d smile.  
“Melanie’s picking up dinner right now, she should be back in a few minutes. You up to eating something?” Georgie asks.  
“Um.” He doesn’t remember how to tell things like that. If he really thinks about it, he’s probably nauseous. “Not now.”  
“Okay.”  
“I think…” he glances at the bathroom door at the end of the hallway, and then down at himself; the way he’s barely standing upright, the hair falling over his shoulders so greasy it’s almost liquid, the scars on his hands. There’s still blood under his fingernails from… he doesn’t even know what. “I think I’m going to take a shower.”

Four hours later the water’s gone cold and he’s lying on the bathroom floor in borrowed track pants and a shirt two sizes too big for him, staring up at the window that’s long since stopped serving as any kind of light source. And this is how his life starts. Or, starts again.  
He thought he’d feel relieved. He does, but he thought it would be overwhelming. What he mostly feels is nothing; all the images of the world put back together, all the details, it’s all been passing through him. He hasn’t been living it. He wonders if he’ll ever be living it. He doesn’t deserve to be living it. Damn it.  
It takes all of his energy to make it back to bed, to Martin, half-asleep, smelling just a little like whiskey, waiting up for him. “Come here,” he says, patting the sheets next to him.  
They’re soft. Jon pulls the blankets up rolls onto his side, staring at Martin in profile. Something looks different about him. It’s not just that he’s looking without Seeing, it’s something else. Something in the way he’s breathing, in the way his eyebrows knit together, in his movements. He’s moving slower. He shifts to face Jon. They stare at each other like that for a while, in the darkness. After what could be hours, he realizes what it is; Martin’s safe, and he looks like it, and he’s acting like it. It’s not that he isn’t scared. They both are, and neither of them have ever been good at hiding it. But he’s safe.  
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Martin brings a hand to Jon’s face, and he realizes he’s started crying.  
“Nothing. I love you.”  
“I love you, too.”  
They look at each other until they fall asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> i am also sleepdeprivedsurgeon on tumblr and tiktok!


End file.
